What's special about vinyl cutters?
Vinyl cutters are perhaps epitomes of automation technology that the world is witnessing today. These are amazing computer-operated machines that surpass our printers. But there's a difference: vinyl cutters use a sharp blade to create designs out of certain materials. The software exports your design from your computer to the machine, thus controlling blade movements like the way it does in printers.
More often than not, these machines are marketed as distribution platforms for expensive designs, available as physical cartridges from retail outlets. Advertisements often highlight them as “craft cutters” that help you accomplish a lot more. But in reality, these machines are capable of performing much superior tasks than just carving out designs on materials.
Cool uses of vinyl cutters
Here are a few interesting ways you can use vinyl cutters:
Stickers and labels
You can use vinyl cutters to make labels and stickers for supplies and materials in your own style. Whether it's a warning in bold, all-caps text or a promotional copy for a product, vinyl cutters can help you create peerless stickers and labels. You can even use them to make stickers for your workshop that glow when the lights are turned off.
Electronics
Yes, electronics! You can use a vinyl cutter to create your own DIY sticker circuits by simply cutting PCB layers, interference protection and foil traces and adding silkscreen labels. You can use a pen for plotting a circuit in silver. From LED stickies to ad-hoc breakouts, a vinyl cutter helps you create a wide range of sticker circuits.
Paper Engineering
You can use a vinyl cutter to cut, score, crease and perforate papers, thin plastics, and cardstocks to carve extravagant origami, kirigami, and other forms of paper crafts. Take a thin cardboard or foam core and cut and score it to create foldable three-dimensional objects. You can add translucent acetate or paper fragments to create amazing plywood lanterns, all with a simple vinyl cutter.
Apparels
You can't imagine how amazing custom apparels a vinyl cutter is capable of making. Transfer any design or illustration for t-shirts or totes and get them created in a few simple steps. Whether it's a batch t-shirt for your classroom or a sports t-shirt for a team, vinyl cutters are incredible assets for creating custom apparel.
If you have or planning to buy a vinyl cutter, you should certainly try doing the aforementioned tasks with it. It's certainly going to bring out the creative side of you.
